How faith plays a role in current events

With so many crazy things happening in our world each day, we wanted to see how – or if—Michiana religious leaders incorporate current events into discussions of faith.

“Sunday morning’s a moment for teaching, as well as preaching,” Pastor Rickardo Taylor Sr. said.

So Taylor, who is the senior pastor at Mount Carmel Missionary Baptist Church in South Bend, uses his pulpit to connect the faith he follows with the news happening in the world he lives in.

“It’s very important that, me as a pastor, when I preach a sermon on Sunday morning, that in that sermon, I have something that’s dealing with today’s [current] event,” Taylor said. “Where somebody can relate to the word of God and say, ‘Hey, this is how I can apply the word of God into this situation that I’m dealing with.’”

This week alone, the nation is watching as communities protest police-involved shootings in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Charlotte, North Carolina, react to the aftermath of a terror attack in New York City, and continue following the contentious presidential election.

Taylor said he knows talking about these current events can sometimes be uncomfortable, but he said it’s necessary, especially in a house of worship.

“We live out the Bible by the way we treat our brothers and sisters daily, through the word of God,” Taylor said. “So we all know how to get to heaven, but God wants us to know how to live on earth before we get to heaven.”

He said Jesus taught with current events, and he tries to follow suit.

“If [Jesus] was talking to carpenters, he talked carpentry,” Taylor said. “If he talked to fishermen, he talked about fishing. That’s how Jesus got the message out to people and then they would listen to him, and then from there, he could take them the way that God was leading them to go.”

Taylor said faith is relatable – connecting all of us, even in dividing times.

“It reminds every culture that even though we may be a different race, we were saved by one God; we were saved by one savior,” Taylor said.

This method of merging faith with current events seems to be pretty rare in South Bend, though.

Nearly a dozen other local religious leaders were reached out to for this story, and of the ones that responded, each said they did not regularly include current events in their sermons, their Bible study groups, their prayer sessions, etc.